Lost in Translation? A Swede’s Snub of U.S. Lit

If you’re John Updike, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Joyce Carol Oates, you don’t have to worry about whether the phone bill has been paid. You won’t be getting the call from Stockholm next week.

On Tuesday, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, gave an interview to The Associated Press and, while not dropping hints about this year’s winner, seemed to rule out, pretty much, the chances of any American writer. “Europe is still the center of the literary world,” he said, not the United States, and he suggested that American writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

The next day, in an interview with the British paper The Guardian, Mr. Engdahl appeared to backtrack a bit. He insisted that the academy strictly followed Alfred Nobel’s rule that in awarding the prize no consideration should be given to an author’s nationality, and added: “It is of no importance, when we judge American candidates, how any of us views American literature as a whole in comparison with other literatures.”

All the same, any American foolhardy enough to bet on this year’s prize — the announcement comes on Thursday — would be well advised to put his money on a writer whom nobody in this country has ever heard of and who is out of print here or, ideally, has never been published at all. For example, Ladbrokes, the British betting shop, has as the frontrunner, at 3 to 1 odds, the Italian essayist and novelist Claudio Magris, followed, at 4-1, by the Syrian poet Adonis. Were either to win, he would follow in the great tradition of the Italian satirist Dario Fo, who won in 1997; the Chinese novelist and playwright Gao Xingjian (2000); and the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek (2004); all of whom caused Americans to scratch their heads and say “Huh?”

Another good betting strategy is to look for a writer with a record of America-bashing. His criticisms of American capitalism and the fact that he was once banned from entering this country didn’t hurt Signor Fo, a playwright and performer whom even some Italians considered a little lightweight; and Harold Pinter, the Briton who won in 2005, surely appealed as much because of his outspoken opposition to America’s involvement in Iraq as for his plays, the best of which were written 40 years ago or more.

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Jessica Hische

If you add all-purpose political correctness or opposition to an unpopular regime, your odds get even better. You would have lost your bet in 2001, when the prickly V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad but transplanted to England, neither a lefty nor anyone’s idea of politically correct, won the Nobel. But you would have collected in 2003 and 2006 with the novelist and critic J. M. Coetzee, born in South Africa but now an Australian citizen, and the Turkish novelist and memoirist Orhan Pamuk. That Mr. Coetzee and Mr. Pamuk happen to be terrific writers is just gravy, though if you want to try that card again — someone politically sound who can also write — then a good long-shot pick for this year might be the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare.

In other words, the Nobel selection process is hardly the lofty and purely literary exercise — the “big dialogue” — that Mr. Engdahl suggests, and it never has been. Whatever else the prize may be, it is not a guarantee of literary excellence. Critics are always pointing out that the list of writers who never won, which includes Tolstoy, Proust, Borges, Joyce, Nabokov and Auden, is far more impressive than the roster of those who did. The duds include Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905), author of “Quo Vadis,” and Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), whose supposed masterpiece, “And Quiet Flows the Don,” was probably plagiarized (at least according to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won five years later).

There are 18 Nobel judges, of whom Mr. Engdahl is one. They’re all Swedes, they serve for life, and in the early years of the prize they tended to vote for — surprise! — other Scandinavians, writers like Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Selma Lagerlof and Henrik Pontoppidan, who were not exactly household names even back then. There used to be a weakness for middlebrow writers like Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck, who championed the downtrodden. But ever since the last American to win, Toni Morrison, took the prize in 1993, there has been a drift not just to the left but away from the conventions of narrative realism. This may be what Mr. Engdahl, himself a post-structuralist literary critic, was referring to when he complained about “trends in mass culture” dragging down American literature: we tend to write, for the most part, about the world we live in, without resort to the devices of myth or fable or allegory, all of which are popular in Stockholm these days.

This is not to say that the Swedish Academy is a united front or that when it sits down for the “big dialogue” there is no conflict of interest. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda didn’t win the Nobel until his Swedish translator, Artur Lundkvist, was elected to the academy and lobbied for him. (Mr. Lundkvist also blackballed Graham Greene, whose politics were almost as left as Mr. Neruda’s. Go figure.) Mr. Gao’s Swedish translator, Goran Malmqvist, a China scholar at the University of Stockholm and, conveniently, an academy member, similarly pressed his case. On the other hand, a member named Knut Ahnlund quit in 2004 over the award to Ms. Jelinek, a feminist, whose work he called a “mass of text shoveled together without artistic structure.” There was also an internal squabble over whether the body as a whole should denounce the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989.

The Swedes read, you have to give them that — they buy more books per capita than the citizens of just about any other country — and they probably care more than anyone else does about their prize. In the United States, a Nobel usually doesn’t produce even the modest uptick in sales that a Pulitzer or a National Book Award does. That fact may underlie Mr. Engdahl’s comments, and especially his observation that we don’t translate enough foreign literature. It’s true. We don’t. Publishers are always claiming that translations just don’t sell here, and they no longer even try anymore. Meanwhile we flood the rest of the world with our schlock, and the rest of the world doesn’t complain much. If you browse in an airport bookshop anywhere in Europe or Asia, you quickly discover that translated Danielle Steele sells almost as well there as back home.

It’s possible, in other words, that Mr. Engdahl has it in for American writers, the Updikes and Roths, not because of their own failings, real or imagined, but because of the rest of us, the American readers, who in truth don’t even read our own Nobel candidates in the numbers we used to, and whose poor mass-culture taste is infecting the rest of the world, even Sweden. Mr. Engdahl has to keep up standards, and probably from his point of view, the more we complain about the Nobel Prize, the more we prove his point.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page WK3 of the New York edition with the headline: Lost in Translation? A Swede’s Snub of U.S. Lit. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe